Carter's father ran a lace export business and made the young Elliott learn French and indeed (IIRC) travel with him on business trips to Europe in the early-to-mid 1920s since he expected him to follow him into the family business.

Unless I am mistaken, Helen Carter was the daughter of Robert Frost, was she not? Therefore she was not only an artist, but was presumably used to living with one!

[edit: see disclaimer 2 messages later...oops!]

I have read this thread with fascination, but have mainly stayed out of it - if anything it has shown me that I have little objectivity where Carter is concerned. I simply can't perceive the problems others have found with his music, finding it infinitely more fascinating, complex (in an expressive sense) and human than anything I have heard by Ferneyhough or Cage, for example.

Some members may have little time for anything redolent of pre-existing 'gestural' norms, but I think it is a positive virtue of Carter's music that it allows for a typically 'expressive' mode of performance while compromising not one jot in terms of its adherence to atonality and rhythmic flexibility. Moreover Carter's use of rhythm seems to me distinctive and functional in a way that I don't hear in very many other late C20th/C21st composers.

As far as Carter's use of characterisation is concerned, I get the feeling that people sometimes put the cart before the horse - would it be so irritating to members had Carter not told them that was what he was doing, in a conscious way? Every composer needs ways of rationalising what he is doing in his own music, and I certainly find that in Carter's music I am usually struck more by the overall direction and dynamism of the musical discourse and its integration with the material than the 'characters' invoked by certain intervals/rhythmic practices.

A bit of googling indicates that I may have been misled about Helen Carter's relationship to Robert Frost...perhaps this is something of an Urban Myth, or perhaps there is some more distant family relationship.

Ollie, not sure I've understood your meaning here, but thanks for prompting a search to find out who Richard Feynman was! The following has brightened and enmirthed my day considerably, particularly the second half of the 3rd paragraph:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

 

I had not heard this before, but it's an extremely telling comment, I think, in its specifics; the metrical hijinks at the opening of the first and second movements are potentially proto-Carteresque, although they exist in the service of essentially conservative aesthetic ends (not the case in Brahms' solo writing, but arguably so in his orchestral works, I think).

Another composer would have more readily pointed to something like Beethoven's op. 131 (maybe my choice), or Berlioz, or Wagner...

I wrote what I did about that purely because the fact of Elliott Carter's marriage of almost 64 years is common knowledge and extensively documented.


I apologise appropriately and unreservedly for my failure to complete the message I posted earlier and can claim only that I was distracted by some telephone calls at the time and erroneously sent it before completing it properly; I will now do just as you ask, as I had intended to earlier, by answering your first five points by saying that I have no problem with any of them whatsoever - indeed, I agree with them entirely.

Best,

Alistair

The following extract

"on 19 December 1895 he married Elinor Miriam White (1872-1938), his co-valedictorian and sweetheart from school. They had gone separate ways upon graduation to attend college, and while Frost had left early, Elinor wanted to wait until she was finished before getting married. They would have six children together; sons Elliott (b.1896-1900) and Carol (1902-1940) and daughters Lesley (b.1899), Irma (b.1903), Marjorie (b.1905-1934), and Elinor Bettina (1907-1907)."
(see http://www.online-literature.com/frost/)

appears to clinch the fact that Helen Frost Jones was indeed not one of the five daughters of Robert Frost, although that fact that his short-lived first-born was named Elliott seems a rather neat coincidence here!

Best,

Alistair